Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Kylie Minogue Mixes Her Signature Cocktail

      by

      The pop star returned to the Carlyle Hotel after celebrating her wine collection there.Kylie Minogue’s early experiences of alcohol were not especially glamorous — canned drinks with teenage friends, boxed wine at family barbecues. But Ms. Minogue, 54, the only female artist to have topped music charts in five consecutive decades, has refined her relationship to liquor since.On a recent Wednesday morning, she stood behind the venerable Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel, a cocktail shaker in hand. She shook it and shook it and shook it, mixing the drink to her own internal beat.“Hey! Hey! Hey! How am I doing?” she asked the Bemelmans barman, Abdul Rashid, resplendent in a poppy-red jacket.“Oh fantastic,” Mr. Rashid said. “I am jealous.”A couple of nights earlier, Ms. Minogue had come into this same bar to celebrate her wine collection — two still rosés, one sparkling — by singing a selection of hits at the grand piano. She had returned this morning to demonstrate her mixology chops.But those chops were a matter of some debate. A publicist had described Ms. Minogue as a practiced bartender with a specialty drink. Yet the cocktail on offer, the Pink Pearl, had been newly created by Mr. Rashid. And Ms. Minogue questioned her ability to mix it.“I’m going to make such a pig’s ear of this,” she said brightly as she walked behind the granite and leather bar.The ingredients for the Pink Pearl included gin, apricot brandy, bitters and Ms. Minogue’s brand of prosecco rosé.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesShe had dressed for the occasion in a mauve pantsuit trimmed in marabou — “Feathers, I didn’t think this through,” she said — and white stiletto heels. She hadn’t thought the shoes through, either. After a brief tussle with the bar’s floor mats, she switched them out for a pair of black platforms, singing a snatch of “You Raise Me Up” as she slipped them on.“We need jazz music,” she called out. “A bit of a vibe.” Jazz, one of the very many genres that Ms. Minogue has attempted, was summoned.Mr. Rashid had already assembled the ingredients and the materials: gin, apricot brandy, lime, simple syrup, bitters, a bottle of Ms. Minogue’s prosecco rosé, various shakers and coupes. (He had also set out an array of snacks — salted nuts, cheese straws, potato chips — that she politely ignored.)She got an assist from Abdul Rashid, right, a barman at Bemelmans.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesMs. Minogue had passed along a few stipulations regarding the cocktail. “It has to be pink,” she had told him. “It has to be fun. It has to be a bit cheeky.” She had borrowed the name, Pink Pearl, from a different drink, invented in her honor at Le Bar in Paris. Perhaps it hadn’t been trademarked.Under her benevolent, lash-extended gaze, Mr. Rashid demonstrated the drink, embellishing it with a float of Ms. Minogue’s prosecco rosé, which her website says has notes “of fresh strawberries, raspberries and blossom.” The garnish was a sprig of fresh mint.“I offer you to do this,” Mr. Rashid told her, chivalrously. “The finishing touch you do.”“I didn’t even do that very well,” Ms. Minogue said, having added the herb.Ms. Minogue, whom the BBC once called “pop’s most underestimated icon” and whom Rufus Wainwright, an occasional collaborator, has designated “the gay shorthand for joy,” first introduced her wines in Britain in 2020, where they have sold briskly. She is not herself a vintner, but she told her partners at Benchmark Wine Group that the wines had to be “elegant, refreshing, not boring, not too challenging,” she said. Put that way, her wines sounded a lot like her music.The finishing touch.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesA taste test.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesHaving begun her career as an actress on the Australian soap “Neighbours,” she sidestepped into pop music while still in her 20s. An early review referred to her as a “singing budgie,” but Ms. Minogue, who is recording a 16th studio album, has rarely let bad press deter her. She worked at her music. She improved.“I just learned on the job,” she said. Then she surveyed the ingredients arrayed before her on the bar. “It’s kind of like this,” she said, turning to the task at hand. “I learn on the job.”So with the occasional assist from Mr. Rashid, Ms. Minogue added a dash of simple syrup (well, more than a dash: “Whoops!” she said), half an ounce of apricot brandy and three-quarters of an ounce of lime juice. He showed her how to turn the jigger over to add the gin. She had a heavy hand with the bitters, which lend the drink its pink tones.“That one got a bit of extra love,” she said, as a few more drops of bitters fell in. “I’ve got to work on my cocktail skills, that’s all.”At Mr. Rashid’s urging, she fitted a metal shaker over the glass’s top and she shook it with verve. “Whoooo!” she shouted, as her whole body swung, in a manner reminiscent of the Locomotion.With some slight fumbling, she then strained the mixture into an ice-filled glass, adding the prosecco, a sprig of mint, and then another spring of mint when the first one slipped under the surface.Cheers.Gabby Jones for The New York Times“And voilà!” she said. She didn’t dare bestow the drink on an assistant. “I’m going to have to taste it myself,” she said of the erratically mixed drink. “I’ll say it’s amazing.”So even though it was only 11 a.m., Ms. Minogue took the straw between her perfect mauve lips and sipped. Was it amazing?“Very refreshing, very nice,” she said with a conspiratorial smile. “Dangerously so.” More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Raja Kumari Brings West Coast Rap to India

      by

      After writing songs for Gwen Stefani and Iggy Azalea, she is now producing singles under her own label, Godmother Records.Name: Raja KumariAge: 36Hometown: Claremont, Calif.Now Lives: In a three-bedroom apartment in the Juhu section of Mumbai, India.Claim to Fame: Ms. Kumari is a songwriter, singer and rapper whose work straddles both Western and Indian music, in a reflection of her dual identities as a South-Asian American. She blends English and Hindi lyrics, and classical Indian riffs over rap beats. Last year, she performed her single, “N.R.I.” (it stands for nonresident Indian) at an Asian-American inaugural ball for President Biden. Sample lyric: “Dot head eating samosas. Too brown for the label. Too privileged for the co-sign.”Big Break: Ms. Kumari started dancing and singing at 6 and, by 10, was performing traditional Indian dance forms across India. She began writing and recording her own songs in her early 20s and eventually signed on with Pulse, a music producer and publisher in Los Angeles, where she wrote songs for Gwen Stefani, Fall Out Boy and Iggy Azalea. Her work with Ms. Azalea on “Bounce” (the video was shot in India) was a spark for Ms. Kumari to get back into the studio herself. “It woke me up,” she said. “I was, like, people want to add my voice, but they don’t want to have a South Asian woman do it? Why am I not taking that leap?”Latest Project: In May, Ms. Kumari released her latest single — “Made in India” — that remixed a ’90s Indian pop hit, featuring the iconic Bollywood actress Madhuri Dixit Nene. A 2020 single that Ms. Kumari’s worked on was featured in the new Disney+ series, “Ms. Marvel.”Raja Kumari’s single “Made in India”Godmother Records/Raja Kumari; Album Art Design by Kirti NarainNext Thing: After years of working with Western labels, Ms. Kumari has started Godmother Records, with “Made In India” being the first single produced under that label. “I owe it to myself to now stand on my own two feet,” she said. Her goal is also to use the label to discover and sign up-and-coming talent in India. “I have this dream of discovering a girl in India, and she wins a Grammy,” she said. “That would mean a lot.”Manifesting: Ms. Kumari, whose real name is Svetha Yellapragada Rao, created her stage name when she was 14 to project a fearless version of herself and to build a visual identity around female Hindu goddesses. “It’s the character I needed,” she said. “I thought about the concept in my room and made it a reality to the point that I was on a billboard in Times Square. I don’t know anything more powerful than that.” More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Rzewski for Lovers? A Pianist Mines a Prickly Modernist’s Gentler Side

      by

      When Lisa Moore turned 60 her husband commissioned a Rzewski score for her. Now, she has recorded a Rzewski album, showcasing a wide range of emotion.The renowned composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski, who died last year, was celebrated for the committed nature of his leftist politics as well as his music.On the political front, he tended to walk the walk — whether writing a series of variations based on a Chilean workers’ anthem (in “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”), or undermining the high-toned trappings of contemporary classical culture by playing at a fish market. He also distributed his scores online, free for any player to peruse.He could also be harsh and exacting in his artistic judgments. But one thing Rzewski wasn’t known for were capital-R Romantic gestures. So when the pianist Lisa Moore introduced one of Rzewski’s final pieces at a Bang on the Can festival at Mass MoCA last year, murmurs of surprise were audible in the crowd as she related that the work was a 60th birthday gift — one commissioned from Rzewski by Moore’s husband, the composer and educator Martin Bresnick. (Bresnick has also mentored multiple artists in the Bang on a Can universe.)Asking this artist to write something for your wife’s birthday? Risky (if inspired). Yet as Moore proceeded to play the 15-minute “Amoramaro,” it all started to make sense. There were prickly, modernist shards familiar from other Rzewski pieces, though also darts of disarming warmth. Reviewing that premiere, I wrote that the composition deserved an official recording from Moore.Now we have it. “Amoramaro” is one of five items on Moore’s new album, titled “Frederic Rzewski: No Place to Go but Around,” released on the Cantaloupe label in June.“It’s like an old man looking back over his musical life,” Moore said of “Amoramaro,” in a phone interview from her home in New Haven, Conn. That musical range of reference includes backward glances at motifs from earlier efforts, as well as what Moore calls “sort of Beethovian quotes.” Also present, to my ear, in the aesthetic mixing bowl: Rzewski’s youthful experience as an early interpreter of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s experimental piano music.The lushness of some of its chords, though, is what strikes me most forcefully on repeat listens. And that’s thanks in part to Moore’s overall approach to Rzewski, which often allows for a greater range of emotion than other interpreters permit, including the composer.Moore, however, said Rzewski’s instructions at the top of his handwritten score were frank about the degree of freedom others could bring to the music: “Love has no laws; therefore dynamics, rhythms, anything can be changed at will!”“He had a very free attitude in that way,” Moore said in the interview. (She knows from experience, having played Rzewski’s music in front of him, as a member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, in the early 1990s.)Moore’s approach to Rzewski allows for a greater range of emotion than other interpreters permit (including Rzewski). Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIn an interview, Bresnick described an extensive and enjoyable back-and-forth with Rzewski during the drafting process, including about what kind of ending the piece should have. “I’m a composer too — and I was surprised that he wanted such a thing,” Bresnick said. “I wanted to say something but I didn’t want to overdetermine it, so I finally said to him: There are endings in Chekhov and other great writers where it’s the end of the story but we know that the story goes on.”For Bresnick, the composer’s solution is particularly pleasing. “It is an ending, but it is not ‘the end.’” When playing her 60th birthday present, Moore found herself luxuriating in Rzewski’s invitation to change dynamics and rhythms “at will.” “If you let things resolve, if you let the harmonies really sit, the next harmony that comes in so often is something that changes like a kaleidoscope,” she said. “It’s just shifting and changing the mode. It’s really, really clever.”There’s something similarly clever about the balance of Moore’s new album. The title track, “No Place to Go but Around,” is an expansive, early Rzewski effort, from 1974 (right before “The People United”). The only other official recording is Rzewski’s — available on an obscure vinyl release from the late-70s.On that LP, Rzewski’s composition shared space with his interpretations of piano works by Hanns Eisler and Anthony Braxton. While the composer’s version of “No Place to Go” offered some stark interpolations of the Italian labor movement song “Bandiera Rossa” — another political reference — Moore’s rendition truly lets that borrowed tune spill forth, toward the end of the 12th minute.Moore said that her take was a considered attempt to underline the composition’s beauty, adding: “I also want people to be invited in and not pushed away.”That inviting quality of Moore’s album extends to her latest performance of “Coming Together,” one of Rzewski’s most well-known contributions to the modern repertoire. Its text comes from a letter by the Attica prison uprising leader Sam Melville. But unlike some ceaselessly galvanic performances of this Minimalist-tinged composition, Moore’s solo voice-and-piano approach takes dramatic notice of references to lovers’ “emotions in times of crisis” that are present in the literary source material. (Moore is a practiced hand at Rzewski’s work for singing — or speaking — pianists, having recorded his setting of Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis.”)Just as striking is her take on the rarely heard “To His Coy Mistress,” a setting of Andrew Marvell’s poem from the 17th century. Moore’s playing is meticulous when it comes to the compact three-act structure of the music (and its text); she hits the gas with a controlled force, just before singing the line “But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” Later on, the word “embrace” triggers a newly reflective mode.So is this a covert “Rzewski for Lovers” album? In an email, Moore wrote: “I did, in fact, consciously think about bringing the more romantic side of Rzewski’s music out, a sort of gentler approach — because it’s there, in the material and often just beneath the surface. (Like him — he was a mensch — behind all his bluster.)”And though the composer was famous for his political stands, Moore’s interpretations help emphasize these works’ elusiveness. “In his music he often disguises and veils the politics in a way I quite admire,” she said. “It’s not hitting you over the head with the obvious. It’s woven in to a song or a letter and it’s up to you to kind of grasp what the meaning is.” More

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      The Pedal Steel Gets Its Resurrection

      by

      As the sound of country music has shifted, the emotive whir of its classic instrument has often been sidelined. The complicated antique has found new life in surprising forms.When DaShawn Hickman was 4 years old, living just 32 steps from the tiny granite House of God church in Mount Airy, N.C., he picked up a lap steel his uncle had built for his mother. Stretching the electric guitar across his tiny knees for the first time, using a D-cell battery as his slide, he traced the hymns his mother sang.Hickman soon graduated to the pedal steel, the lap steel’s byzantine successor, with as many as 24 strings controlled not only with two hands but also with both feet and knees. A quick study, Hickman was 13 when he began leading services at House of God with his steel/strings, the centerpiece of a century-old style of Black gospel called Sacred Steel.“This instrument is a ministry, a tool to help someone overcome,” Hickman, now 40, said by phone from Mount Airy. “Where the human voice can’t fully reach, the pedal steel can.”In June, Hickman released “Drums, Roots & Steel.” More restrained than many of its Sacred Steel predecessors, his solo debut is a showcase for the instrument’s emotional breadth, equally capable of prayers for the wounded and paeans for the joyous.It is one of several recent recordings that suggest that the pedal steel — familiar mostly for the lachrymal textures it has long lent to country music — is finding renewal in unexpected places. As the sound of slick modern country shifts from this large and esoteric accessory, ambient and experimental musicians have tapped it for much the same reason as Hickman’s Sacred Steel lineage: its ability to harness and even rival the expressiveness of the voice itself.“Since its existence, you had to learn how to play one way to get a backing role in some country band,” said Robert Randolph, the son of a New Jersey House of God deacon and minister who came to prominence more than two decades ago when he dared to take his 13-string purple behemoth out of the church. He was soon opening for the Dave Matthews Band at Madison Square Garden. “So it’s an instrument that’s never been fully explored.”With his boisterous Family Band, Randolph expanded Sacred Steel’s reach by turbocharging its sound, strings screaming for three hours over soulful marches and Allman-sized jams. His sound and style have since mellowed, and he has collaborated with Carlos Santana and Ozzy Osbourne. “Guitar, trumpet, piano, keyboard — they’ve all had nine million babies,” he continued. “But the pedal steel is so new to so many people they don’t even know what it is. There are so many ways to evolve this instrument.”Robert Randolph helped expand pedal steel’s reach, collaborating with musicians including Carlos Santana and Ozzy Osbourne.Michael Nagle for The New York TimesThat evolution is accelerating: The modern steel icon Greg Leisz played on half of Daft Punk’s final album, while the funk band Vulfpeck recently commissioned the Los Angeles whiz Rich Hinman to interpret a Bach chorale. The Texan Will Van Horn went viral in 2016 for covering Aphex Twin with pedal steel, while Dave Harrington, half of the haute electronic duo Darkside, used it as his compositional tool for Alanis Morissette’s recent meditation album. A new fleet of stirring steel players has emerged, and an 11th volume of the long-running guitar compilation “Imaginational Anthem,” out Friday, offers a snapshot of the evocative instrument’s intrigue.“One reason it has taken so long to grow out of the genre it’s been pigeonholed in is because it’s so technically complex, and that complexity has kept a lot of people in the country world,” said Luke Schneider, the Nashville player who curated the new collection, by phone. He detailed how the knees push levers that bend strings, how the feet trigger pedals that stretch them, how the hands work in constant harmony. “It might be the most difficult instrument in the Western world to learn,” he concluded.Schneider, 42, once thought he might have to stay in the country world, too. A longtime devotee of ambient music who knew of other Nashville players flirting with experimental sounds, he instead backed the singer-songwriter Margo Price in her early country years and later joined the masked musician Orville Peck’s band. Nashville sounds, Nashville paychecks.But he then encountered Susan Alcorn, one of the instrument’s rare iconoclasts alongside the tinkerer Chas Smith and the famed producer Daniel Lanois. Her 2006 album, “And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar,” felt like a pioneer’s sketchbook of exotic places a young player might take the antique. Schneider followed her lead, trying to use the pedal steel’s stature to his advantage.“You’re literally playing this instrument with your whole body. You have to conjure your feelings, then connect them to your toes, your knees, your fingers, your eyes, and your ears,” Schneider said. “All of that combined can express the voice of a musician in a way few other instruments can.”Schneider recorded his solo debut, “Altar of Harmony,” which arrived early in 2020 lockdown, using only pedal steel, shaping sighing strings into hypnotic drones. “By its very nature, the sound the instrument produces is ethereal, so it’s calming for the player and listener,” he said. “That still comes through at the edges of modern music.”Likewise, before he began collaborating with Morissette during the pandemic, Harrington discovered a postmodern poignancy inside the pedal steel’s mechanics. For years, he’d played a solo guitar rendition of “Pure Imagination” from “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” often as a soundcheck warm-up. When he added steel, he spotted the song’s bittersweet heart and cut it as an album finale.“You’re literally playing this instrument with your whole body,” Luke Schneider said. “You have to conjure your feelings, then connect them to your toes, your knees, your fingers, your eyes, and your ears.”Morgan Hornsby for The New York Times“It unlocked a little trap door into the feeling of one of my favorite songs of all time, like the camera had been turned 45 degrees,” Harrington, 36, said via video chat. “It’s a happy song that’s just so sad.”Despite the pedal steel’s manual demands, this rush of applications and ideas is a result, in many ways, of digital accessibility. The Danish guitarist Maggie Björklund, 57, stowed her pedal steel in a closet for two years when she first tried to learn around 2000 because its mechanics proved too difficult and she knew maybe three men in Denmark who played it. She ultimately flew to Nashville to study with Jeff Newman, a beloved instructor who informed her she’d been doing it all wrong.“I thought I knew a little bit about pedal steel, but he said, ‘You sound like a German hausfrau,’” she recalled by phone from north of Copenhagen, laughing. “He ripped all that away from me and gave me the basis I still play.”Just five years later, the New York guitarist Jonny Lam decided to pursue pedal steel as a way to differentiate himself in a city with a glut of guitarists. He stumbled upon The Steel Guitar Forum, where amateurs building instruments in garages argued with the likes of Buddy Emmons, who had revolutionized the instrument’s design, tuning and sound.Those cranky older denizens (“No one ever knows how to post a picture,” Lam, 42, joked) became his gateway, offering a low-stakes way for a Chinese American neophyte to learn the lessons of Nashville. He devoured classic instructional texts and records, but the forums (and, now especially, YouTube) remain founts of inspiration for Lam and younger players, reducing barriers to entry for an expensive and isolating instrument.“Twenty years ago, I didn’t know what a pedal steel was. There was this monoculture of white males,” Lam said. “But now people are doing quirky things with it online, and different kinds of people are being exposed. That representation matters.”Still, for both Björklund and Lam, pushing past the pedal steel’s conventional territory took time. Lam played pristine honky-tonk fare with his band Honeyfingers and supplied old-school textures for Norah Jones and Miranda Lambert. Björklund cut two elegant folk-rock albums as a steel-wielding songwriter, then played in Jack White’s backing band.Their tracks on “Imaginational Anthem XI,” however, feel like coming-out parties. During “Rainbows Across the Valley,” Lam’s high and low tones slowly curl around chattering birds. Björklund’s “Lysglimt” backs a sinister Spaghetti Western theme with unsettling noise and electronic throbs, like a storm cloud commandeering the horizon. Lam has composed a modern Chinese opera for the pedal steel, and Björklund is now finishing a series of solo pedal-steel abstractions. These are new starts for their old instrument.“Traditional pedal steel is beautiful, but the notes have already been played. It would be such a shame for it to be a dusty instrument in country music,” Björklund said, sighing. “It is much more interesting to explore the outer edges, where it comes into contact with the modern world.” More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Theater at Geffen Hall to Be Named for Two Key Donors

      by

      The Wu Tsai Theater will honor a $50 million gift from Joseph Tsai, a founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, and Clara Wu Tsai, a philanthropist.In late 2020, as coronavirus infections surged and cultural institutions shuttered, the fate of the long-delayed renovation of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, was uncertain.Then came a $50 million gift from Joseph Tsai, a Taiwanese-born billionaire co-founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, and his wife, Clara Wu Tsai, a philanthropist. The donation moved the project forward, accelerating construction so the hall could reopen in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule.In a nod to role of the Tsai family, Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic announced on Wednesday that the main auditorium in the hall would be named the Wu Tsai Theater.“It really took courage,” Katherine Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center’s board, said of the gift in an interview. “And that courage inspired other people, and it made a big, big difference.”The gift represents one of the Tsai family’s biggest ventures so far into the performing arts. Joseph Tsai, who trained as a lawyer and serves as vice chairman of Alibaba, is more frequently associated with athletics. He is the primary owner of the Brooklyn Nets and has played an important role in helping the N.B.A. expand in China. The couple has previously contributed to universities, hospitals and social justice projects, among other gifts.Clara Wu Tsai, who is also a member of Lincoln Center’s board, said in an interview that she and her husband were moved by the opportunity to create jobs for New Yorkers and help make the performing arts more accessible. Also being named for the Tsais: a concert series aimed at increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the arts and bringing together performers of different genres.“My dream is that we have a full hall of diverse audiences and that we get programming in there that really showcases the versatility and flexibility that the hall was created to offer,” she said.Geffen Hall’s $550 million renovation will bring both aesthetic and acoustic improvements, with wavy beech wood walls and seats that wrap around the stage. Other additions meant to draw people in include a 50-foot digital screen in the lobby that can broadcast concerts to the public and a studio looking out onto Broadway.The hall is set to reopen on Oct. 7, with a concert featuring Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” among other pieces, before an audience of emergency medical workers and construction workers who took part in the hall’s renovation. Two galas and an open house weekend will follow later in the month.Clara Wu Tsai said she was confident that audiences would turn out, despite lingering concerns about the coronavirus and changing habits around going to live performances.“Everybody’s waiting to hear what will be one of the best concert halls in the world,” she said. “The timing is going to be good.” More

    • 63 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      The Robust Return of Beyoncé

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherBeyoncé’s seventh solo album, “Renaissance,” is a rich tribute to the long history of Black dance music, from disco up through ballroom house. It functions both as collage and history lesson, and also captures an evolution in her songwriting and personal presentation toward more modern directions.For Beyoncé, who is 40, it is a strong midcareer pivot that asserts her singular place in pop music, capable of essentially disappearing for several years then re-emerging on her own terms, and still finding her audience.On this week’s Popcast, a deep dive on Beyoncé’s new album, her push-and-pull between tradition and futurism, her relationship to queer music communities and the ways in which she reframes understanding of authorship and ownership.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterWesley Morris, a critic at large at The New York TimesJon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticSalamishah Tillet, a contributing critic at large at The New York TimesConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Duke Ellington

      by

      We asked jazz musicians, writers and others to tell us what moves them. Listen to their choices.A few years ago, Zachary Woolfe, a New York Times critic and editor, posed a question: What are the five minutes or so that you would play for a friend to convince them to fall in love with classical music? How about Mozart? Or the violin? Or opera?Over the course of more than 25 entries, dozens of writers, musicians, critics, scholars and other music lovers attempted to answer, sharing their passions with readers and one another.Now, we’re shifting the focus to jazz — and what better place to start than with Duke Ellington? A nonpareil composer, pianist and bandleader, he arrived in New York from Washington, D.C., just as the Harlem Renaissance was getting underway; soon, the Duke Ellington Orchestra had become the soundtrack to an epoch. He grew to be a Black American icon on the national stage, and then an ambassador for the best of American culture around the world. Jazz’s status as a global music has a lot to do with Ellington: specifically, his skill as a leader, collaborator and spokesman, who rarely failed to remind his audience, “We love you madly.”Here are 13 tracks that we think will make you love Ellington. Enjoy the listening, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Darcy James Argue, bandleaderAn underappreciated part of Ellington’s artistry is his mastery of misdirection. You think you know where the music’s going … then you blink and realize Duke’s taken you on a wild detour. This sleight-of-hand animates the A-side of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” Ellington’s 1937 inverted arch-form masterpiece. It’s a blues; what could be more straightforward? But Ellington bobs and weaves, stretching out chords and turnarounds, twists the 12-bar form back on itself like an ouroboros, and careens through a dizzying set of modulations: five keys in under three minutes! But the journey isn’t just loud to soft — it’s discombobulation to clarity. The ’56 live version from Newport is legendary for the saxophonist Paul Gonsalves’s immortal 27-chorus “wailing interval,” but it’s “Diminuendo” that sets the stage.“Diminuendo in Blue”Duke Ellington (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Ayana Contreras, criticMahalia Jackson’s resonant yet winged vocals float masterfully across the expressive string and horn arrangement of “Come Sunday,” Ellington’s ode to the singular day that Black workers historically, clad in Sunday best, could shed the sweat and grit of labor: emerging as glistening butterflies, gathered to praise the Lord. According to Irving Townsend’s 1958 liner notes for “Black, Brown and Beige,” the album it’s taken from, Jackson “hums an extra chorus as if she were aware of the power of her performance and wanted to let it linger a moment more.” Of course she knew. “Come Sunday” communicates with crystal clarity Ellington’s admiration for laborers and his elegant insistence on unconditional respect.“Part IV (with Mahalia Jackson) — a.k.a. Come Sunday”Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticHere’s Johnny Hodges, delivering four minutes of the most seraphic alto saxophone playing to be found on record, on this chestnut from Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s “Far East Suite.” That title is more or less a misnomer: Almost every piece in the suite has a Middle Eastern inspiration. And Strayhorn — Ellington’s composing and arranging partner of over 25 years — actually wrote “Isfahan” before their visit to that Iranian city in 1963. (Its original title was “Elf.”) This is one of Strayhorn’s classic cascading melodies, and the arrangement is Ellingtonian balladry at an apex, with its luxuriously dragged tempo and drumlike dabs of trombone harmony. As usual, it’s a featured band member that really makes the recording — this time, Hodges, cradling each note between his teeth, firm but not too tight, smearing and giving them all kinds of feeling without muddying or obscuring a thing. It’s a standard, but when’s the last time you heard a pianist cover this tune? That’s Hodges’s doing.“Isfahan”Duke Ellington (Legacy Recordings)◆ ◆ ◆Billy Childs, pianistI cannot listen to the first 50 seconds of the opening credits to “Anatomy of a Murder” without seeing shapes: Cubist shapes like a Picasso painting, with fragmented shards of sound from the different sections of the band, punctuated by the pointillistic drum pattern. From the opening “wah” of the cupped trombone, through the white-hot trumpet bursts, to the saxophone mini-cadenza, this piece grips me like a vise. The main body of the tune, a gutbucket blues passacaglia over which trumpet, clarinet, saxophone and piano solo, conjures in my mind a sublime sense of foreboding which perfectly sets up the mood for the entire movie.“Main Title and Anatomy of a Murder”Duke Ellington (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerDuke Ellington always had this way of pulling strong emotions from the keys of his piano. On the 1962 version of “Solitude,” featuring the bassist Charles Mingus and the drummer Max Roach, Ellington properly evokes the feeling of isolation through sullen, spacious chords reflecting dark and light textures. Where the 1934 original elicited a certain optimism, this one, from the album “Money Jungle,” sounds gloomier — headphone music made for inclement weather. By the time Mingus and Roach arise near the song’s back end, Ellington has locked into the upper register of his solo, shifting the sound from ambient to a bluesy number with light drum brushes and subtle bass. It was a grand victory lap for one of jazz music’s pioneers.“Solitude”Duke Ellington (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Harmony Holiday, poetMingus and Roach accompanied Ellington on the first recording of “Fleurette Africaine,” for “Money Jungle.” Left alone with his reflection in this solo version, Duke’s sway and almost-smile conjure longing and remembrance. He plays with the ghosts of his friends and spares them blunt nostalgia. He hesitates as if approaching a sacred altar of sound, and then surrenders to his solitude, allowing himself to be haunted by their absence but not diminished by it. This version is more jagged than the original, as Ellington confronts the missing tones by blurring them with his own. For a man who spent so many years maintaining a large orchestra that could play back the tones he heard in his head, Ellington seems to find the most solace alone. It’s as if all of that time spent in public was in pursuit of this isolated spiral, either as a soloist or with the phantoms of a couple of friends in a garden he invented for them. He’s soloing here, but he’s not alone, which would be frightening if it weren’t so beautiful.“Fleurette Africaine”Duke Ellington (via YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆Maurice Jackson, jazz historian“Black, Brown and Beige” encapsulates the full orchestration of Ellington’s work. The suffering of Black people through the wailing of the trumpeter Rex Stewart. Their struggles through the saxophonist Harry Carney’s musings. Triumphs using the “tom tom” of the drums. Duke called it “a tone parallel to the history of the Negro in America,” dedicated to Haitians who fought to save Savannah, Ga., from the British during the Revolutionary War. “I have gone back to the history of my race and tried to express it in rhythm,” Ellington said. “We used to have a little something in Africa, ‘something’ we have lost. One day we shall get it again.”“Part I (with Mahalia Jackson)”Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆David Berger, musician and scholarRecorded March 6, 1940 — the first Ellington recording session with Ben Webster’s tenor saxophone and Jimmy Blanton’s propulsive bass completing what I would call the greatest band in jazz history. If Ellington’s oeuvre can be reduced to the marriage of the unschooled and the sophisticated, “Ko-Ko” is his finest example: a three-chord minor blues that tightly develops the motif introduced in the first measure through six dissonant, wild and imaginative choruses, serving notice on jazz composers and arrangers for decades to come. Modern jazz began here with an explosion.“Ko-Ko”Duke Ellington (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Jon Pareles, Times chief pop music criticEllington’s music stayed open to jazz’s younger generations. “In a Sentimental Mood,” from an album he recorded in 1962 with John Coltrane and members of his quartet, leans into the ambiguities of a composition first heard in 1935. Ellington’s opening piano figure tiptoes around the chords it implies; Coltrane’s saxophone wafts in as if the melody is nearly too exquisite to disturb. Later, Ellington’s piano solo summons and then dissolves its own hints of 1930s swing, and Coltrane just teases at his own sheets-of-sound approach before returning to the grace of the original melody. The track is a paragon of mutual respect and shared, subtle exploration.“In a Sentimental Mood”Duke Ellington, John Coltrane (Impulse!)◆ ◆ ◆Miho Hazama, bandleaderThe happiest music in the world! I’ve had the privilege of conducting this “Nutcracker” suite a couple of times, and it always makes me wish I had annual gigs to keep performing it every holiday season. With a huge admiration for Ellington and Strayhorn, who wrote specific notes for each band member, this score is phenomenally done. The performance on the record is hard-swinging, exhilarating and authentic, from one of the orchestra’s later golden ages.“Peanut Brittle Brigade (March)”Duke Ellington (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces)◆ ◆ ◆Fredara Hadley, ethnomusicology professor“A Rhapsody of Negro Life,” from Ellington’s score for the 1935 film “Symphony in Black,” demonstrates his deep engagement with the moods and shades of Black life. In nine minutes he moves us musically from the plodding pulse of work songs to the swing of 1930s Harlem nightclubs. He matches the drama and the wail in “The Saddest Tale” with the beauty and the contemplation of “Hymn of Sorrow.” This music isn’t a treatise; it is a rhapsody in the best sense, in that each musical vignette is full of heart and intimate understanding of the joys and pains of Black humanity.◆ ◆ ◆Guillermo Klein, bandleaderI was immediately captivated by the storytelling of this tune — simple, yet profound and witty. The core of “Searching (Pleading for Love)” relies on the conclusion, which he states at the very beginning of the piece, as an intro, like a narrator sharing what it’s all about in a prologue. The theme follows a standard model: three times an idea and a conclusion. The bridge of the tune modulates two times, and that conclusion motif is present throughout. Right at the climax he varies it, giving a sense of pleading. His use of sound and space is just his own. Even on a trio recording like this, you can definitely hear the big band in his playing.“Searching (Pleading for Love)”Duke Ellington (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times music criticI recommend including this 1936 masterpiece in party playlists. When “Exposition Swing” comes on — with Ellington’s locomotive writing pulling listeners aboard — watch as guests tilt toward your speakers. Next, Harry Carney opens his baritone sax feature with a strutting, descending figure. As he finishes the solo, the orchestra cheers him with a modernist swell built from sustained tones, complex and cool. After another minute of dexterous soloist-and-orchestra interplay, stride-piano and blues accents from Ellington trigger the piece’s climactic phase, which incorporates collective shouts of that same descending motif heard during Carney’s opening. It’s a perfect hangout in microcosm.“Exposition Swing”Duke Ellington (Naxos)◆ ◆ ◆Song excerpts via Spotify and YouTube. More

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      The Meridian Brothers’ Mastermind Is Electrifying Roots Salsa

      by

      Eblis Álvarez’s albums are “collaborations” with fictional bands. His latest, with the imaginary El Grupo Renacimiento, is a psychedelic fever dream and a critique of technology’s encroachment.One day Artemio Morelia, a singer and maracas player for an obscure Colombian salsa band called Grupo Renacimiento, awoke and found himself transformed into a robot. Haunted by visions of HAL 9000, he was suddenly acutely aware of the coldness and the distractions of a constantly plugged-in world. “Memory is dying,” he sings on his band’s new single, “Metamorfosis.” “They’ve already connected the internet to my lung/to my heart.”Or at least that’s what Eblis Álvarez, an academy-trained Colombian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, wants you to believe with the release of his new album, “Meridian Brothers and El Grupo Renacimiento,” out Friday. Meridian Brothers is a moniker Álvarez uses on many of his albums — “collaborations” with fictional bands, in this case Grupo Renacimiento. Although he plays all the instruments and handles all the vocals on the album, he also performs live with a regular Meridian Brothers Band that features four of his friends from Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá.For Álvarez, “Meridian Brothers and El Grupo Renacimiento,” the first release on the renowned Ansonia Records in 30 years, is a Latin American novel disguised as a “B-salsa” album — his term for forgotten, B-list salsa performers, or salseros, like Orquesta Kool, who recorded under “precarious conditions.” It’s at once a psychedelic fever dream, a deep dive into salsa’s past, a critique of society’s surrender to technology, and a new musical encounter between Colombia’s sophisticated capital of Bogotá and its rustic Caribbean coast.“Grupo Renacimiento is like writing a book about the rebirth of a group of artists who fall into vice and re-emerge because of their Christian faith. It’s just a crónica about a classic salsa story, like the story of Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz,” Álvarez said in a video interview last month, referring to the classic 1970s New York salsa combo. “This is a record that tries to emulate the ’70s sound of the golden age of salsa dura,” or hardcore salsa.Invoking the crónica, a Latin American literary genre that combines journalism and fiction — and making a self-produced “mockumentary” that describes his encounter with Grupo Renacimiento in a Colombian church — Alvarez has injected the project with a playfully surreal flavor. According to the mockumentary, the group was formed in a small town called Las Tinas in the state of Magdalena, just a couple of hours down the road from Aracataca, which the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez reimagined as the fictional town of Macondo.Álvarez can come off like a pedantic ethnomusicologist until he veers off into theories about creating a 3-D space to rescue humans from a 2-D world of information technology, and his search for the salsa groove. Animatedly holding forth from his office in Bogotá, his long scraggly hair was part ’70s rocker and part medieval jester, and his singsong accent — emblematic of a uniquely Colombian charm — was both lilting and dead serious.Álvarez, 45, has released more than 25 albums since 2005, some as Meridian Brothers and others under other names, all of which have poked, investigated and tried to tease out a sense of authenticity in Colombian music. Some, like “Paz en la Tierra” in 2021, focus on the traditional vallenato genre, a storytelling folk music popularized by Carlos Vives in the 1990s, while others fall into the category Álvarez calls “neo-tropical,” excavating rhythms like champeta, a Colombia analog to Caribbean dembow.“I’m trying to describe a futuristic past,” Álvarez said. “It’s not a futurism that owes machines or technology, it’s an acoustic future.”Juan Jose Ortiz Arenas for The New York TimesHis effort is part of a decades-long Bogotá-based nation-building mission to mine the music of coastal areas, pioneered by artists like Ivan Benavides, once a Carlos Vives bandmember; Richard Blair, a British expatriate who founded his group Sidestepper with Bogotá-based musicians; and Bomba Estéreo, whose keyboardist and programmer Simón Mejía recently premiered “El Duende,” a short documentary about an African-descended family that makes marimbas and lives on Colombia’s Pacific Coast.“Meridian Brothers and El Grupo Renacimiento” has a stripped-down aesthetic, which is the essence of salsa itself — an uptown, urban genre born after the decline and fall of the flashy big-band Palladium Mambo era, much like punk arose in the wake of grandiloquent British progressive arena rock. Álvarez focuses most of his attention on a dubby, echoing psychedelic electric guitar and tinny keyboards, supplemented by a synched-in rhythm section of timbales and congas. You can hear hints of West African highlife and Congo-derived soukous, a hybrid of Cuban rumba.With his skanking guitar marking time at the center of the riffs, Álvarez’s lyrics comment on police brutality (“La Policía”), the purity of roots salsa (“Poema del Salsero Resentido”) and concern over nuclear weapons (“Bomba Atómica”). “Descarga Profética,” which imagines a Bogotá salsa jam as an ancient Greek algorithm with African influences, dizzily riffs on the 1930s Cuban classic “El Manisero.”In the mockumentary, Artemio Morelia says that his bandmates’ interests ranged from vallenato to Italian ballads, but that he felt compelled to play the kind of lo-fi, roots salsa practiced by the ’60s Venezuelan group Federico y su Combo (who released a song called “Llegó la Salsa,” one of the first to mention the term, in 1967). He also cites Ray Pérez, the legendary Afro-Puerto Rican bandleader Rafael Cortijo, and most importantly, Brooklyn’s Lebrón Brothers, a group central to the creation of salsa that evolved from early experiments with English-language, Cuban-derived boogaloo and hit its stride with “Salsa y Control” in 1969, yet saw little commercial success.“I identify with the rejection that the Lebrón Brothers experienced in their time,” Álvarez said. “I was attracted to their way of playing, the aggressiveness, but also their slowness, their introverted-ness.”The album’s final track is a cover of a Puerto Rican jíbaro classic, “La Mujer Sin Corazón,” by La Calandria, a.k.a. Ernestina Rivera, who was born in Puerto Rico and died in the Bronx in 1994. Álvarez chose the track to honor Ansonia Records’s vast catalog, one that still resonates strongly for fans of Ramito (Florencio Morales Ramos, known as the king of jíbaro, or Puerto Rican country music); Johnny Rodríguez’s bolero trios; Mon Rivera’s bomba and plena recordings; and Dominican merengueros like Dioris Valladares and Joseíto Mateo.The label, founded by Ralph Pérez, who moved from Puerto Rico to New York in 1920, was a family-run business with Pérez’s daughter ultimately teaming up with the music entrepreneur Herman Glass, and later his son, Gerard. “I was just fascinated how these musicians, most of whom could not read music, would make music that would touch people so much and make them get up and dance,” said the younger Glass, who grew up listening to Ramito and hanging out at the Teatro Puerto Rico on 138th Street in the Bronx’s Mott Haven.In 2019, the Glass family sold Ansonia Records to the former KCRW D.J. and film music supervisor (“Y tu Mamá También”) Liza Richardson. “We’ve digitized 5,000 songs about two-thirds of the way through, and we’ve released probably 20 percent of that for streaming,” Richardson said in an interview. “Ansonia is a time capsule that is just going to get better with age. There is so much beauty in it. Hopefully we can do a lot more new releases, but right now we think we can afford to do one new release a year.” At the suggestion of her longtime friend Camilo Lara (who records electronic music as Mexican Institute of Sound), she agreed to acquire Álvarez’s new Meridian Brothers project for Ansonia’s rebirth.In the spirit of Ansonia, Álvarez is hoping not only to recapture the treasured moments of the past, but to slow down humanity’s rush to embrace the artificiality of digital life. “I’m trying to describe a futuristic past,” he said. “It’s not a futurism that owes machines or technology, it’s an acoustic future. When Elvis Presley, in his first recordings with Sam Phillips, tried to create reverb in the studio, they didn’t have corporate technology. They worked with the creativity of the mind and heart.”The Meridian Brothers will perform at SummerStage Staten Island on Aug. 6; cityparksfoundation.org/summerstage. More